This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending
I = Investment
G = Government Spending
NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
Some animals are cute and can simulate human children.
Other animals are capable of some tasks, like dogs searching for drugs, bombs or people, or helping the blind. Most animals however are kept for their bodies: meat, milk, egg, fur, skin.
The movie Matrix explores this idea, humans are kept alive for their bodies. They are not kept in constant suffering at least, as we do with many animals.
AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.
Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
YMMV but out of the people I know, the lefties are less likely to be hardcore pro-gun-control than the people who lean center-liberal, and this has been true for a long time. John Brown Gun Club, etc.
I’m a progressive voter and my waning interest in gun control is that it’s a political nonstarter. But I’m sure there are fellow progressives that are reasoning in the way you suggest.
In any case, if the majority of the “prevent Federal overreach” 2A crowd truly believed in that principle, then I would have expected thousands of armed citizens in Minnesota repelling the extrajudicial abuses taking place there.
Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder (revolution/civil war/government crackdowns, however you want to label it), but I think some people have stopped hoping for that.
I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really really bad.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.
Not sure why you seem to think people would need to resist the government rather than, more simply, the relatively small number of billionaires who purchase and pervert it.
I don't know what you're suggesting. How would widespread gun ownership help with the government being subverted by oligarchs? Vigilante justice? Wouldn't change anything for the better. More paranoid billionaires would just start running things from private compounds and transit between in private jets and armored convoys. That's not a far step from what many do now, and would be extremely powerful social pretext for authoritarian crackdown.
Sure, jack boot thugs killing a fee people in broad daylight with a government sanction tends to do that. But I’d rather we not have the brown shirts in the first place…
Oh there's plenty of evidence. Because a lot of these people have been committing to repos in public for over a decade. Wouldn't take much to show the world just how fallible human coders really are.
Depends on the "human employee." If you're burning an "unimaginable" number of tokens, you're already in the top decile of employees, at least. Will the top decile not become obsolete? Maybe. I certainly hope so, just out of sheer survival instinct. But I shudder to contemplate what will be inflicted on everyone else.
> Violence is not a panacea, but often, the outlet.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
History demonstrates categorically that violence is the last and most reliable form of recourse available to the disempowered, once society has trended too far towards either an excess of freedom or an excess of equality. And, in fact, our position in that balance between freedom and equality is perpetually oscillating, tending to finally reverse direction only in response to violent revolt.
This cycle has repeated over and over, essentially since the dawn of civilization. This was among the most important insights of 'The Lessons of History' by Will and Ariel Durant. And it's baked on two very simple insights about human nature: (1) those in power rarely give it up willingly (they often do the opposite) and (2) fear, on average, is and always will be a far stronger motivator than appeals to a person's conscience.
(1) We already automated the critical path of a great deal of processes, where that made economic sense. The long tail exists, but it's not replete with as much juicy low-hanging fruit that makes for splashy use cases. Rather, AI will likely produce a tremendous number of marginal improvements over time, which are likely to aggregate and eventually show up in improved top line performance. This could certainly accelerate if agentic AI becomes a true 1:1 replacement for certain types of labor.
(2) Outside of automation, AI is faster search. The information was there and now we can find it more quickly. This helps a great deal, but it's not fundamentally transforming access to information, which was already free and effectively limitless. But there's still value here. I think one key advantage of AI on the search side (for now, prior to meaningful degradations that might ensue) is that it can help push back against exploitative information asymmetry in insurance, consumer goods, health, etc.
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has consequences.
Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out chart toppers.
Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.
> But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are genuinely determinative.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous
Not in this case, no, at least as far as the music goes.
My user-name here is taken from a Northern Soul record as its the music that means the most to me. The genre is obscure almost by definition.
I would guesstimate the proportion of the hundreds (thousands?) of records so classified and celebrated made by people under 30 to be over 95% and that correlates with my (admittedly subjective) experience of the best music of other pop genres.
I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?
Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.
Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.
Note that in 36 odd states in the USA companies and their officers (i.e real people) cannot boycott Israel (or even say nasty things) and then do business with the state.
But if you say the American government is occupied by zionists loyal to a foreign government, that's "hate speech" and would land you in prison if not for the enduring strength of the first ammendment (which several Europeans ITT think is bad, because they think "hate speech" is bad and they lack the mental fortitude to admit that sometimes right wing meanies might actually have a valid point.)
Yet another illusion. A lot of Americans are very good at finding ways to persecute people for having an opinion, often using economic consequences as a cudgel to enforce groupthink. And, at this very moment, the government is compiling lists of people it regards as enemies, purely on the basis of their "free" speech.
No need to wait: they've already fried themselves out of the evolution game with STDs. Any child they have will likely be retarded or diseased in some way.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending I = Investment G = Government Spending NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
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